In this episode of the Sunny Ray Show, host Sunny Ray talks with Adam Ze, CEO and co-founder of My Standard, a web3 employment and talent acquisition platform. Adam explains how My Standard flips the recruiting model by giving individuals self-custody over their own data, letting them decide who can see it and getting paid when employers access it, instead of platforms like LinkedIn capturing all the value. He traces his path from a basketball obsessed kid who pivoted to golf, into a decade long sales career at CareerBuilder, then Fortune 50 talent acquisition consulting, where he saw firsthand how staffing agency spend and inefficient hiring processes were hurting companies and candidates alike. Adam also shares how discovering Chainlink in 2017 and being mentored by an early community figure known as Chainlink God pulled him deeper into web3, and how smart contract automation, not speculation, is what convinced him blockchain technology would eventually be adopted everywhere. The conversation covers data ownership, aligned incentives, and the future of hiring.
My Standard's Adam Ze explains how giving people ownership of their own data could fix broken hiring and recruiting.
Can you give us the elevator pitch for My Standard?
My Standard aims to change who owns the data. Today we give up our data to a Facebook, LinkedIn or Google who profits from it. We're building a self-custody architecture where you hold the keys to your data and nobody can see it without your permission. When you share it, you get paid and the organization instantly sees who you are. Our first use case is talent acquisition, helping companies and people connect fairly without employer side bias.
How do you break the network effects of something like LinkedIn?
It won't happen instantly, it's bit by bit. We're creating a better experience for both sides by aligning incentives, people actually get paid for their information, which is the most powerful driver of behavior. We also empower people to stay anonymous and deny access if they want. LinkedIn does social well, but we're not competing there, we're winning the notification battle instead.
Where does the money that pays users actually come from?
It comes from the employer side. Employers pay for access to the platform, and that money essentially gets distributed to the users whose data they're accessing.
What was young Adam into before any of this?
My dad was a top ranked basketball player in Illinois and I thought I'd follow him, so basketball was my whole life until freshman year of high school when I stopped growing at 5'8 while everyone else kept going. I switched to golf because height doesn't matter there. I actually thought I'd end up in marketing, inspired by an uncle who worked in Chicago Bulls marketing.
How did you first land in the talent and hiring world?
Right after college I needed a job and found a company with a marketing arm, but you had to start in sales to get there. I turned out to be good at sales, and when I saw the pay cut to move to marketing I stayed in sales for about ten or eleven years. That company was CareerBuilder, and I eventually moved into a consulting role while always staying in talent acquisition.
Which skill from those career builder and consulting years matters most today?
The early scrappy sales days really help with startup life, since you're constantly raising capital and selling the dream before things are built. The consulting years helped me formulate the actual solution and speak confidently about the problems we kept seeing repeatedly. I never got an MBA, but I got what my godfather calls a street MBA, learning it in the seat.
Who's Chainlink God and how did he pull you into the space?
He's someone I met early on who understood what Chainlink was trying to do and patiently answered my questions despite all the noise and FUD in crypto back then. He's now one of the most respected voices in the Chainlink community and even joined their team. Years later he became an advisor for My Standard, which felt like things coming full circle.
When did you realize the data problem in hiring was essentially a web3 problem?
It clicked when we tried to build true data ownership and realized the only way was for the data owner to hold the keys, not have it sit on our web two server. Centralized servers cause centralized problems, we see leaks and hacks constantly even at the most trusted companies. A web3 architecture was the only way to create real data ownership.
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